You Don’t Know Who You Are

A quick and mostly comic burst of pictures on Twitter show Edutwitter contributors in their adolescence(s) as a curious mix of Addams Family, aspiration and rebellion. Who do we want to appear to be? Who did we want to appear to be? If it isn’t too convoluted, who did we want to appear to aspire to become? It is enough to send me back to the self-reflection (or gnawing introspection, maybe) of my previous posts. I am still mulling over those things that marked my Lent and Holy Week and Easter Week around how I “know who I am.” Let’s ponder the outward appearance as discussed on Twitter, in the context of how we appear now and how we presented in a different time. Time is the crucial thing, fundamental to a fluidity of who we might have appeared, how we acted and the motives for our actions. In the words of R S Thomas

…with our ear to history’s
curved shell we listen
to mixed sounds…

The curve of the shell changes the meaning; to change the metaphor, fundamentally change in time changes the lenses through which the past is viewed.

Here am I, and as a bit of a contrast (but in no way a real comparison) here’s my friend and colleague Jon, both of us 21-ish, but some 20 years apart. Old enough in our twenties to be recognisable, but in crucial ways different from how we are now. I think I can see the Jon I know now – a bit; I guess I can see me in that tweedy boy with the curly hair and wary eyes, but of course I was there, just south of the cloisters in Chichester with friends. I also know Jon because the picture he has shared fits with the story he tells of himself. These things are easier when they are consistently represented. More detail might add to the story, make sense of the coronet of spiked hair and the straight-into-the-camera gaze, but as Thomas says, the message is already distorted by “history’s curved shell.” One thing I am wary of is the quick diagnostic.

At least I know how I appeared, and remember how I presented: a nice young man, a conformist, maybe a bit scared of the world. Who did I want to become? I’m not sure if I know “who I was,” then, although I can give myself some hasty headlines now, along the lines of “crazy mixed up kid,” although that’s a “quick diagnostic”too. I know I was scared of being found out, of being known as a shallow imposter. That stays with me. I know what I lacked toward myself – and probably others – was the word I keep coming back to: compassion. More baldly, I don’t think then I knew who I was either. I think I wrote something about that time about being a mix of St Francis and the Big Bad Wolf. Dipsychos. Of the two of us, Jon looks to me the wolfier, but maybe that’s just my prejudices.

So here we are now. Something like convergent evolution appears to have taken place.

However, the outward appearances of a growing uniformity are only that: they might only be dress-code deep. Now there’s a phrase that just fell onto the screen! Onlyby knowing ourselves and one another do we move beyond the shallow expectations. Jon and I may bring a bit of Country Living to a working relationship, but friendships are not made of tweed, a fragile, passing world, where moth and rust disfigure (Matt 6:20); they are made in knowing the other, and learning about ourselves in the process.

What constitutes “knowing who you are”? How we dress? What we say? What we do? What we read? Our Goodreads account, our Twitter presence? And when do we say it? This moment? That? A past year, a just-gone moment? This photo is of me in June 2018, in the same place as the first one of me. Is this “now” a real me? What about some moment still to come? What will survive of us? Maybe the good we exhibit in our relationships? We are in Larkin territory – coincidentally, in Chichester, where that boy with the curly hair had his photo taken. This is a good critical reading of Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb and here is my photo and thenhere is the text of the poem itself. Larkin’s cool eye looks at the memorial of a married couple and he comments

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth

To try and say who I am solely through how I used to look or how I wanted to present myself is misleading, dress-code deep in itself. Fun though this is on Twitter, it is in the growth, the people we grow with, the people we help to grow, that “who we really are” becomes shown; in friends like Jon, and Mat, and all the others at work; in Maggie, in my dad; in Stephen and Robert and all my friends I rarely see; and my kids who live here or visit and call. Larkin is as cynical as I am wary, but I sense he, like me, would like

to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.